Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Bars

We’ve had a very active morning and are heading into a busy afternoon. I still wanted to bake something, so I decided to finally try an easy “starts with a mix” recipe from Betty Crocker. I’ve had my eye on this one for quite sometime and now I wish I’d made it sooner.

After you’ve formed the six cookie dough balls, you’ll have just the right amount of dough left to spread across the bottom of the pan. Don’t make your cookies too bit, or you won’t! Also, spreading the dough can be tricky. I always wet my hands a little and that seems to help.

I followed the recipe for this one, but added a splash of vanilla to the peanut butter mixture. I think if I’d had some extra chopped peanuts on hand, I would have sprinkled them on top too.

If you bake a lot, you might be used to using unsalted butter. The chocolate/butter layer of these calls for “butter” and not unsalted. If you use unsalted, you might want to add 1/8 teaspoon of salt to the chocolate mixture just to make up for the salt not in the butter. If you are using salted butter, no worries!

And one last thing. This was another recipe where the mix worked beautifully, so I recommend starting with the mix if you can find it. However, if you live in a place where they don’t sell peanut butter cookie mix, you might try making these with home made peanut butter cookie dough.

Anna, these look wonderful and I love chocolate and peanut butter together! Generally I don’t use cookie mixes, though. Do you think the recipe would work if I used a basic peanut butter cookie recipe for the bottom layer?

Lisa, I don’t see why a homemade cookie dough wouldn’t work. I will say this — this was a recipe where the filling and topping were the star and the mix-based cookie dough was just “atmosphere”. But I can understand wanting to do it from scratch, so let me know if you do.

Oh drat. I was all set to make these, had even checked to see that I had all the ingredients and didn’t need to go to the store. After mixing the peanut butter cookie mix with 1 T. of water and 3 T. of oil, I thought that the dough was certainly sticky and thin. Oops. The PB Cookie Mix was snack size instead of regular. Darn!

So now I either try to salvage what I started or start from scratch? If I do made-from-scratch PB cookies, I’m not going to want them as “atmosphere.”